CISC 105 Example

Objective: a problem for students to work through during the individual code review sessions. The problem will foster discussion about how to organize and think about writing a solution.

Problem: Your boss needs to determine the paycheck for several employees. The boss has a file containing a list of numerical employee ids, the number of hours the employee worked this week, and the employee's hourly pay rate (in dollars). If an employee works more than 40 hours, he gets paid time and a half for the overtime. (1.5*payrate*overtime_hours) If an employee works more than 60 hours, she gets paid double time for the overtime. (2*payrate*overtime_hours)

Example Input File:

employee_id1   num_hours1   pay_rate1
employee_id2   num_hours2   pay_rate2
...
employee_idn   num_hoursn   pay_raten

Your task: Determine the pay for each employee in the boss's data file.

Output Specification: Print a table of employee ids, pay rate, hours worked, and the calculated salary. The output should be neatly lined up.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What is the name of the input file? What does the input look like? What is the datatype of each input value? When do you stop reading data from the file? What do you do when you reach the end of the file?
• How do you compute the pay? What datatype is the pay? Can you make the computation into a function?
• What should the output look like?

After you've coded a solution, you should look through your code and do some housekeeping.

• Does your code make sense to other people? Will the code make sense if you look back on it in a month? How can you make it clearer?
• Did you use all the variables that you declared? If not, you should get rid of those variables.
• Is your algorithm clear? Can you simplify your algorithm and still be correct?
• Did you close the input file?
• Are there any "magic numbers," e.g., values that should be defined in a #define statement?
• Add descriptive comments about sections of code and what the program does in general.

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